[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

<shrug> I've been dealing with PCs since the original IBM PC with a green mono monitor, dual 360K 5.25" floppy drives, and a 4.77mhz 8088 CPU and 256KB of RAM running MS-DOS 2.X was first beginning to invade corporate desktops and Lotus 1,2,3 was single-handedly forcing everyone to upgrade to a full 640KB of RAM to accommodate large worksheets.

I did things backwards; started with Apple and then went to DOS. In this case the Apple was a IIe, might have had 48k. Started programming in BASIC and LOGO, then in high school we had AutoCAD. Never liked the original Mac but the IIc was sweet.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Along the way I've learned various tricks to optimize performance. I'll take your word on the results you describe, but I'm still unclear how you managed it.

Other than telling it to hurry the hell up because I had other things to do, I genuinely did nothing other than flip a switch.

Now my curiosity's going; I'll give that guy a call and see if he has either of those still.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

We have different levels of acceptable performance. My desktop lags way behind the current performance curve, with a 2ghz CPU, 3GB of RAM, and onboard video, multi-booting Win XP Pro SP3, Win2K Pro SP4, and Ubuntu 9.10. I have other things to spend the money on, and what it does is adequate for my purposes.

I do as well, at least most of the time. One of my hobbies/sidelines happens to be building machines though, so I get a charge out of getting new hardware. With that in mind, one of the goals in building my production rig was a high performance-per-dollar ratio; getting 90% of the performance of a state-of-the-minute rig for 50% of the cost is a sizable win for me, so I can have the horsepower with money left over for tires.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

The challenge has been wringing performance out of the old Fujitsu Lifebook, and I think I've hit a hardware imposed wall. PArt of the challenge with the Lifebook was what performance I could achieve without spending money. I might be able to help things with more RAM and a faster HD, but I'm not inclined to pay for them.

I get where you're coming from now; initially I got a frustration vibe as if you were expecting a lot more in terms of performance.

I get a kick out of "seeing what we can get out of it" as well; it's the old hot-rodder thing. In fact I recently likened it to old English sports cars; you'll never make your original investment back, and it'll never catch up to a modern BMW, so you just have fun with it.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I looked at DSL back when, when I was looking for a distro that would run on low end kit. The last I knew, DSL had run into a wall because the developer had reached a limit on what he could successfully include and keep the distro size under 50MB. A spin off with a different approach is TinyCore Linux, with a distro that I believe is around 10MB, where it's just enough to get you a running Linux system and the assumption is you will add what you want once you have.

I did a review of Tiny Core here and here, as a matter of fact.
In the first one, I also reviewed something called Kolibri; runs on 10MB RAM, the whole OS is in assembly language. Has a bunch of DOS-era games too; you might want to check it out for entertainment value if nothing else.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Sure. Bottom line here is starting from the Ubuntu Minimal CD to get a working CLI installation, then manually adding XFCE4 through apt-get (which brought along the required parts of X as a dependency) produced a usable system. Starting with Xubuntu did not.

Okay, I must have misunderstood you previously. I can definitely see where you're coming from with that now.